M. J. Young wrote: Marco, I want to thank you for sticking with us here through a lot of arguments about the various agenda. I think your contributions have often assisted me in clarifying my own thoughts.

I want to focus for a moment on the notion of a simulationist game.

First, it's pretty clear that we mean a simulationist-facilitating game, that is, one whose mechanics tend to reinforce simulationist choices and produce simulationist-friendly outcomes.

Second, and this I think gets lost in the shuffle, it must also be recognized that we're talking about a game that facilitates a particular variety of simulationism. We're very clear that gamist-facilitating games can facilitate or impede different styles of gamism. The same is true of narrativist-facilitating games, although we don't see it as much perhaps. It makes perfect sense that some games would support one type of simulationism, but not all types of simulationism.

Third, a game might be engineered to facilitate one specific agendum, or even a specific type of a specific agendum, and yet neither impede nor facilitate a different type of play, even a different agendum. A great deal of narrativist play took place within simulationist designs before narrativist games were developed, and it is entirely likely that some still does.

There are a couple of spots at which simulationist mechanics impede narrativist play to a significant degree.

One of those is in character death. It is extremely rough on narrativist play for the referee to announce, "The hero of the story just got killed by a lucky shot from the villain's henchman." Narrativist games often include mechanics which prevent protagonists from being killed without player approval; simulationist games rarely if ever do. In a narrativist game, when the character says, "It doesn't end this way; I don't die like this," he's probably right. In a simulationist game, he's probably wrong.

You are absolutely right that mechanics that support verisimilitude do not force a game to be simulationist, nor do they necessarily impede narrativist play. However, such a game is more likely to be simulationist, because the mechanics provide the sort of reliability of outcomes on which simulationist play is largely built, and narrativism requires something other than reliability of outcome--it requires injection of premise in a way that impacts play.

This is why the Spiritual Attributes of The Riddle of Steel are recognized as narrativist: suddenly the issues at stake to the players impact the outcomes of game events. Without those, the system is extremely good at reproducing "who would win" in fights. Those introduce into play a notion of "who should win", based on who cares about this enough to win.

So a game that is perfectly simulationist in design can be played narrativist without removing rules if things work right (e.g., the hero doesn't happen to get killed). It can also go narrativist if it is drifted unconsciously--for example, if the referee would never think of having some lowly henchman take a cheap shot at the player character when his back is turned, we've got a narrativist-facilitating decision interfering behind the scenes and we don't even realize it. (Of course, in a solid simulationist game, the henchman would take that shot, and he might just succeed.)

--M. J. Young

Hi, Marco -

This is an interesting post. I agree to you that bonus dice for addressing premise or narrative elements more broadly is merely an often narrativist-faciltating technique, not narrativism itself. In certain cases limited applications of this technique could also help with Sim though ("these guys are Celts, they hate Normans, so they get a +1").

People here often say two things that superficially conflict: that e.g. AD&D and earlier versions of D&D are gamist-facilitating games, and that to facilitate gamism you need something with mechanics that provide a challenge at the player/pawn-stance level. Certainly, a lot of solid gamist designs (T&T, Great Ork Gods, 3e with its feat, skill, spell, and PrC combo minimaxing) have this in different forms. But what was early D&D's mechanic? Essentially, roll a d20 to hit, with modifiers from class/level and magic items, and then roll damage. There's really no 'game' there in the sense that there is even in say T&T; it's just a random walk.

But I think it's right to say that D&D was used to facilitate Gamism, and that it did it for many groups. How, then? The Challenge was at the metagame level: figure out how to maximize your edge in a situation before the dice hit the table; select spells and charged items judiciously by situation; follow up on GM clues; and so on. This was where you 'stepped on up'. (Another way was to have a list of magic items a mile long, but this character-fetishism (alive and well in most incoherent Sim/Nar RPGs produced by Big Games Inc. today) needs a different analysis.)

So anyway. We need, in many discussions here, to distinguish between rules that simulate something in an imagined reality but may nonetheless be designed to facilitiate Gamist or Narrativist play and rules that are designed to facilitate Simulationist play even though they may employ techniques that seem gamey or story-making. Regardless of the outcome of the recent "TRoS is Gam/Nar, not Sim/Nar" thread, there's an important point there: nothing about having long lists of weapons and maneuvers, which might seem 'Simmy' because you're going to a lot of work to model an imaginary reality, dictates that you're looking at a Sim-facilitating ruleset. Rather, it might just be color for a Narrativist fantasy game - or maybe there's another table which gives each weapon an emotional significance of some kind - or it might be a springboard for hard-core player-level RPS, prisoner's dilemma, or other tactical competition.

There needs to be a HARD distinction between rules that spend time on simulating an imagined reality and rules that facilitate Sim play. There's really only the loosest sort of connection between them.

So, where am I going with this? Well, the fact is, 'light simulation' rules - that is, rules that try to provide a simple simulation of an imagined reality and not much else - are actually better, in many cases, for facilitating certain kinds of Narrativist and Gamist play than many more complex RPG rulesets are. Why? Because these rules just give you a broad idea for an SiS, give you simple mechanics for resolving tasks or conflicts or both, and then get out of your way. If you're going for Gamism, then, you do the thing I wrote about in my 'Grognard speaks' thread, where you put all the challenge at the 'scene-framing' level, the player's use of their in-game resources to dictate the conflicts they will face and how they will face them; if your'e going for Narrativism, you use any of a variety of techniques to get people on the same page thematically (or at least weave the different characters together based on what they're looking for individually) while using the rules as a backdrop for when they actually do stuff.

An interesting thing about this is that while making the rules lighter can facilitate better Nar and Gam play relative to a traditional RPG, the zero-point solution - freeform - is functional for Nar but not really for Gam, I think. Maybe if someone has ideas on that they can start another thread to analyze the claim or call bullshit on it.

SO, anyway, conclusions. I agree with you that Nar play is possible under a good generic or Sim-facilitating system, that there are techniques for doing it, that some of the tricks TRoS uses are good models for how you might push any Sim-facilitating system in a Nar direction, and so on. But I guess what you're seeing as a weakness in Nar systems in your original 'thesis', if I understand you correctly, I see as a strength. "Hello? If you don't want that premise, play some different game!" I thought that was the whole point of one style of Nar-facilitating design, to give people a game with a focused premise to explore. Doesn't grab you, play something different.

I also think the amount of work you have to go to varies with a lot more things than with what a system is trying to facilitate and how well it does it.

But anyway, I'm mostly agreeing with you, assuming that I understand where you're going. The corollary I'm adding is that there's a parallel to what you're observing for Narrativist play with certain forms of Gamist play. Vincent once wrote something to the effect that he was a 'serious advocate of freeform relative to the rules of a traditional RPG'. "Traditional" is vague, but I'm definitely 'a serious advocate of rules which lightly simulate some imagined reality and do nothing else relative to the rules of a lot of RPGs which have been popular since the early 1980's, if you want to facilitate certain types of Gam and many types of Nar play'. They provide a minimum framework for resolving disagreement and don't get in your way when you want to engage in other sorts of exercise.

I agree with this--a two things to point out:

1. D&D's tactical challenge is traditionally said to come from resource management. That means spells, items, and HP. We have to know when to push on and know when to head back. The fights are just resource sinks.

This, clearly, is a simplification--but the simplicity of the combat mechanic isn't the end of the story there, is all I'm sayin'.

2. For Narrativist play I think it is difficult to say with certainity what the premise will be. Mike Holmes once postulated that having a character visit every weapon store in town looking for the right sword could be a statement about "what makes the warrior--the man or his weapon?" (I'm paraphraseing--I'm just pointing out that no single behavior is indicative of a CA).

In a sense, TRoS is exemplary of this: if you fight with enough SA's going it doesn't matter too much what your weapon skill or weapon choice is. If you don't then it *does*. That could well be Narrativist.

[ And if you just picked your SA's to be going "when you fight" then, you know, it may not be too. ]

-Marco

Hiya,

Here's a big "me too" on the content of the thread so far. And a heavenward glance in hopes that no one is considering any of this to be disagreement with the essays. Absolutely necessary processing and clarification, as well as others' takes and examples, yes.

Best,
Ron